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Everyone makes mistakes, especially when we’re first finding our way around a kitchen. But if we continue to repeat those mistakes, they can become ingrained as habits. If you’ve picked up any of these bad cooking habits, it’s seriously time to break them.
You Don’t Heat Up Your Pans
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In a sense, this isn’t your fault. The burners on an average home stovetop might generate 7,500 BTUs, compared with the 30,000 to 35,000 BTUs that a restaurant range pumps out. It’s no wonder your pans don’t get as hot.This makes it more difficult for you to achieve adequate searing on your meats, which means you’re missing the complex flavors that develop through the browning of proteins, as well as the color and texture.<The right way: Heat your pan over medium-high heat until a droplet of water jumps and skitters around on the surface of the pan. (But don’t add oil to the pan before testing, or it will spatter.)
You Underseason Your Food JGI
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By seasoning, we mean salt. And it’s natural to be cautious when adding salt to your food. After all, you can always add more, but you can’t take it out. Anyone who’s tried the completely ineffective potato trickknows this to be true. But please, for the love of gumbo, don’t let that scare you. When it comes to salt, most recipes say “season to taste,” which means, obviously, that you should be able to taste the salt.The right way: Season as you go. And don’t forget to salt the cooking water for pasta, rice and potatoes.
You Don’t Read the Recipe
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This might be one of the worst cooking habits there is, and it leads to all kinds of unfortunate results. Have you ever started preparing a recipe and then discovered midway through that you’re missing one of the ingredients? What do you do? Leave it out? Might not work. Substitute something? Again, depends on what it is, and what you’re using instead. Drop everything and run to the store? Sure, as long as it’s not Christmas Day, and you don’t have pans in the oven or simmering on the stovetop. The right way: Read the recipe all the way through before starting. TWICE.
Your Kitchen Knives Are Dull
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The worst part of using dull kitchen knives isn’t that it makes it so much harder chop and slice your food. It’s that it makes cutting yourself so much easier.That’s because when you’re working with a dull knife, you have to press down harder to force the blade through your ingredient. And as you apply more pressure, the blade is more likely to slip.The right way: Keep your knives sharp, and store them properly so they stay that way.
You Scoop Your Flour
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Again, not entirely your fault. Many recipes list flour quantities in cups, so it isn’t surprising that people measure their flour that way. But it does produce unreliable results, due to the fact that scooping a measuring cup into a bag of flour is a terribly inaccurate way to measure flour.
The right way: Weigh your flour with a digital scale.
You Keep Your Butter in the Fridge
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In general, the impulse to refrigerate food is a good one. Cooler temperatures slow the growth of bacteria that can spoil your food or make you sick. Why not refrigerate everything? Not so fast. First of all, it isn’t necessary. Temperature is only one of six factors to contribute to the growth of bacteria. Moisture and protein are two others; bacteria need an adequate supply of both in order to reproduce.
The right way: Fearlessly store your butter on the counter in an opaque butter dish with a lid.
You “Tenderize” Your Meat
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Like refrigerating food to keep it fresh, taking tough cuts of meat and making them more tender is another worthy goal. After all, no one wants to wear out their bridgework gnawing on shoe-leather steaks.The trouble is, the methods you’re using to achieve that goal are the wrong ones. Specifically, marinating. Someone, somewhere, is responsible for originating the idea that marinating meat helps tenderize it. Whoever they are should have to eat a catcher’s mitt as punishment.
The right way: Forget trying to tenderize meat by marinating, and use one of these three methods instead.
Source: thespruce
